Okay, Dave Weigel, you want to double down on defending Rand Paul, that’s your business. But let’s be honest. You are telling us that Rand Paul is coming at the matter of Civil Rights from a sincere place and that “he despises racism and believes almost all Americans agree with him.” In debate, this is called begging the question. In refusing to endorse the federal desegregation of lunch counters, Rand Paul makes people wonder if he is a racist. We know that he explicitly denies that he’s a racist, but we don’t know if he is telling the truth. That is why we must look at other elements of Paulism to help us decide. That is why Joe Conason referred us back to Ron Paul’s racist newsletters from the 1990’s. It was a nice catch, considering that he was able to cite Dave Weigel as the author of a 2008 piece on those newsletters in which he and co-author Julian Sanchez concluded:
Ron Paul may not be a racist, but he became complicit in a strategy of pandering to racists—and taking “moral responsibility” for that now means more than just uttering the phrase. It means openly grappling with his own past—acknowledging who said what, and why. Otherwise he risks damaging not only his own reputation, but that of the philosophy to which he has committed his life.
Considering what Weigel and Sanchez documented in that piece, it’s very hard to understand why they were still willing to give Ron Paul some benefit of the doubt. Sure, he may not be a racist even though he published newsletters “replete with claims that Martin Luther King “seduced underage girls and boys,” [and] that black protesters should gather “at a food stamp bureau or a crack house” rather than the Statue of Liberty…”
It’s true that even if Ron Paul is a racist the same is not necessarily true of the son. But if Rand is different from his father…if he doesn’t run with the same crowd, then why did he hire a spokesman like this?
In December, Chris Hightower, the spokesman for Paul’s senate campaign, was forced to resign after a liberal Kentucky blog discovered that his MySpace page had a comment posted around Martin Luther King Day that read: “HAPPY N***ER DAY!!!” above what appears to be a historical photo of the lynching of a black man.
The photo and comment appeared to have been posted to Hightower’s MySpace page by a friend, not by Hightower himself. The comment has since been removed but at the time it was discovered by the local blog it had been up for nearly two years.
If you think it’s fairly innocent to fail to erase egregiously racist comments on your MySpace page, there’s this post that Hightower made himself:
So, I was in Rivergate Mall today in line to get some pizza and I noticed a group of Afro-Americans were looking at me with hate and whispering stuff. I was wondering WTF and procceeded to sit facing them and give them the “what the fuck are you looking at look”. Anyway after a few snarls they quit looking at me. I was like do these fuckers think I am someone else or what? Anyway I finished my food and went to find some new shoes. About 10 minutes later, another group of Afro-Americans are giving me the same looks, it then dawns on me, there has to be something on this hoodie that is pissing off the Afro-Americans. And sure enough when I get outside the mall I look and bingo. KKK …. LOL!”
Who says ‘Afro-Americans’? Who wears a hoodie with ‘KKK’ printed on it? That story doesn’t even make sense.
Rand Paul’s father is a racist and Rand hired a racist to be his spokesperson. I think that raises enough doubt that we can’t allow Weigel to stipulate that Rand “despises racism and believes almost all Americans agree with him.”
Dave Neiwart has done an excellent job of detailing the racist ties of the Paulists over the years, and it really shouldn’t be a secret or something we have to debate. The only question is whether Rand is different. Does he have more enlightened views on race, as many younger people do? I grant that it’s possible, but his position on the Civil Rights Act and his comment about Tiger Woods don’t give me much comfort.
Weigel does his best to explain Rand’s views on desegregation:
[Rand] does not believe that the Constitution allows the government to force businesses, landlords, etc. to change how they do business and who they do business with. And he fears that doing so in the name of positive social change puts us on a slippery slope to extra-Constitutional measures in the service of negative social change — taking away guns, putting people in camps. You can disagree, but that’s where he’s coming from.
This, of course, is the exact argument ‘respectable’ people made in opposition of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Weigel acknowledges this but has a mitigating explanation.
It’s essential to put Paul’s belief in the context of 2010 instead of the context of 1964. He sees less of a need now for the government to intervene against discrimination in private business because there is less discrimination now. And go and try to prove him wrong on that.
But this is a dishonest gambit. Rand Paul wasn’t asked if he would oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964 if it were to be debated today, but whether or not he would have voted for it back then. And he said ‘no,’ using the same justification as the racists of the time.
So far, I’ve focused on the question of Rand Paul’s alleged racism and Weigel’s defense, but Rand’s ideology is flawed even if we accept his explanation at face value. The entire reason that the federal government got involved in telling private businesses not to discriminate and segregate is because the market failed to force them to do it. If forcibly segregating lunch counters was bad for business, according to the Paulist philosophy, the owners would have banded together to force the politicians to allow them to integrate their lunch counters. It didn’t happen and it wasn’t going to happen in the foreseeable future. That’s why the federal government had to step in.
Dave Weigel needs to give up his defense of Rand Paul. He’s embarrassing the Washington Post.
